Hi, this is AJ, welcome to the next lesson. This one is called “Healthy Heart" and l'm

going to talk about, again, a section from Healthy at 100 -- the book Healthy at 100 --

by John Robbins. I've already talked about it a little bit and I'm going to talk about a

different section this time.

And in this section John Robbins talks about another factor that contributes to a long

and healthy life. Now before we talked about diet and what you eat and how that can

really affect your healthy, your longevity, meaning how long you live, how strong you

are, everything.

Well there's another very important factor other than diet. Diet is very important, but

another important factor that John Robbins found when he studied all these people

who were 100 years old or more and they were still strong, still healthy, well he found

something else.

So a kind of vegan diet, that was number one, but the next thing he found was these

people have strong social ties. They have rich social lives. It means they're not alone.

They have friends, they have family. They have communities. They're connected to

other people in many, many ways. And so what he found was that emotion and love

and caring and connection were equally important to diet and exercise. They're both

very important.

So let me read a section from his book -- the same book -- Healthy at 100 and then ll

talk more about it. Here we go.

"We cannot live for ourselves alone,' wrote Herman Melville. 'A thousand fibers

connect us with our fellow men. Perhaps this explains why we are often moved by

people caring deeply for one another.' 'There are also medical implications to whether

we think of others or only of ourselves,' as Larry Scherwitz found when he conducted a

most unusual study. He is now the Director of Research at California Pacific Medical

Center's Institute for Health and Healing in San Francisco.

"Dr. Scherwitz taped the conversations of nearly 600 men. About one-third of these

men were suffering from heart disease, the rest were healthy. Listening to the tapes,

he counted how often each man used the words I, me and mine. Comparing his

results with the frequency of heart disease, he found that the men who used the first

person pronouns the most often had the highest risk of heart trouble.